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AMD Lures IBM Veteran to Lead Chip Design

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the drawing-on-experience dept.

Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that Advanced Micro Devices yesterday said it had hired Jeff VerHeul away from IBM to lead the direction of AMD's future silicon design. VerHeul's most recent post during his 25-year stint at IBM was head of engineering and technology services. Now, he will lead the development of all future AMD computing products, including silicon roadmap design across all AMD's engineering sites worldwide."

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  1. Power PC's strength is system-on-chip by Mobile+Unit+of+the+G · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Athlon wins the prize for brute CPU power, but the real strength of PowerPC is that IBM can design custom chips based on combining PowerPC cores with additional processing elements. This technology is behind Deep Blue, Blue Gene, the PS3, and the Xbox 360.

            This kind of chip is hard to program for, but can deliver unbeatable performance per dollar, square centimeter and watt when software is codesigned with the hardware.

            AMD and Intel are going in this direction with dual-core, but IBM is already way ahead. For instance, BlueGene is based on a special chip that has two PowerPC cores with an incoherent cache (tricky to program but cheap and fast) and adds an enhanced vector processing unit. IBM is a leader in higher-end SoC solutions (really, anything that gets power from the wallplug instead of a battery.) Lower-power applications are using MIPS and ARM cores instead...